Aquarium Lighting, News; Reef & Google Search

 

Revised 10-20-13

With the many articles I am a part of either writing, producing pictures, or any other input; one of the best, and most constantly researched is: "Aquarium Lighting; Information & Facts".

However of late I could not help but notice that most readership is from International locations, not the USA. Further I have noted that when exploring USA Reef Forums, many seem to totally ignore the researched FACTS presented in the "Aquarium Lighting" article.
Instead many of these USA Reef Keeping Forums tend to favor LED lighting systems that have older generation emitters or use less than optimum "cool white", "warm white", or green emitters.
Correct Research Based Resource: Aquarium LED Lighting, Lights, Reef, Planted

YET, when I go to forums from other countries (sometimes requiring a translator), I see much more balanced discussions about what makes for good aquarium lighting, reef lighting in particular.

This got me wondering as to "WHY"?

While I do not have an absolute answer, I did notice that a couple of the better websites dealing with complete, accurate and up to date aquarium lighting products/information have fallen "off the grid" in Google, as well a Bing searches, while not so much with Bing, Blekko, or DuckDuckGo which more and more is becoming my search engine of choice.

With Google in particular spam websites (often with duplicate/mirror websites too) come up now in search.



EXAMPLES INCLUDE:

*aquariumlighting.com
*petsmart.com/family/index.jsp?categoryId=2769134
*amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A2975458011

Please click on the picture for a better view of a screen shot of Google Search results for "Aquarium Lighting"

These are not the types of websites I would expect to see when looking for accurate information or up to date products.
At least Blekko & DuckDuckGo brought up primarily information websites, and decent ones at that.
Similar observations can be made for a search for "Reef Aquarium LED Lights" for which Google mostly produced outdated technology and spam results versus Blekko.
Science Based Product Resource Result: Reef Aquarium LED Lighting

While I can state with some authority as to the accuracy of many of the websites and often poorly researched information presented in many USA Reef Aquarium Forums, I cannot as to the workings of search engines.
HOWEVER the search results speak for themselves, so I urge those who are stuck in Google, or forums such as Reef Central, to think outside the box and look for other sources of information or other search engines other than Google, Bing, etc.
Let me also clarify that I am not saying all search results in Google are bad and all information found in forums such as Reef Central, rather simply look around for information that might reflect more research, professional experience, etc.

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Copyright;
Carl Strohmeyer & Steven Wright